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ISL�s Approach to Spirituality and Spiritual Direction:
An Experience of Ritual Process and Transformation
By Ruth E. Snyder
In the document, �Toward a Theology of Personal Transformation for Mission,� the staff of the Institute for Spiritual Leadership (ISL) writes the following: �We believe that each person is a unique word of God, called to participate through personal transformation in the ongoing growth and wholeness of creation. This personal transformation enables mission, which is an extension of compassion to all creation.� Institute for Spiritual Leadership, �Toward a Theology of Personal Transformation for Mission�, Chicago, 2001.
ISL is about facilitating journeys of personal transformation for mission. The ISL program is designed to help participants with their own personal transformation and also to teach them the art of spiritual direction in order to companion others on their transformational journeys.
From September 1999 through graduation in June 2000, I had the privilege of being a full-time student in the ISL program; it was a transformational experience for me. I left differently than when I arrived, and my ministry and mission were significantly influenced because of my time there. In September of 2001, I returned to ISL as an intern with responsibility for supervising six students training in spiritual direction. The experience of both of these years has provided me with the opportunity to reflect upon the unique experience that is ISL.
The questions I began to consider are these: What is it about ISL that enables such significant transformation to occur for so many others and me? What makes ISL unique from seminary training or continuing education events that I have attended over the years?
Applying Turner�s Insights
I believe the answers to these questions can be found by applying the insights of cultural anthropologist, Victor Turner, to the ISL experience and its approach to Spiritual direction. Essentially, it is my contention that Turner�s concept of ritual process aptly describes the ISL experience. In addition, I believe that current brain research provides further explanation for the transformational aspect of ISL. Unlike seminary and continuing education training with its focus on academic, left-brained work, the ISL approach is �ritual process� that involves the whole person�body, soul, and the entire brain.
Victor Turner (1920-1983), born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland, was educated at the University College of London and the University of Manchester. His field of expertise was cultural anthropology and he taught in the United States at the prestigious Universities of Cornell, Chicago, and Virginia. His area of particular interest and passion was in indigenous practices of transformation such as rites of initiation, healing, and social elevation. Turner, Victor, Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1969), pp. v � vi.
From 1950-54, Turner and his wife, Edith, lived among the Ndembu people of Zambia, Africa, and participated in their daily lives. Initially, Turner was an outsider looking in as he observed the rituals of the tribe, but he came to understand that �it is one thing to observe people performing the stylized gestures and singing the cryptic songs of ritual performances and quite another to reach an adequate understanding of what the movements and words mean to them.� Ibid., p. 7. In order to correct this disparity, Turner engaged in a set of interviews with a tribal chief fluent in English who graciously explained the specifics and meanings of Ndembu ritual. Because of this, and continued observation and participation, Turner grew to have a profound appreciation for indigenous ritual and was immensely influential in leading Western scholars to view ritual with new eyes of respect.
Three-phased Process
As a result of his fieldwork, Turner began to write about �ritual process� which is, essentially, the process of transformation. He begins by drawing on the work of Arnold van Gennep (1909) and his work on rites de passage,� defined as �rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age.� Ibid., p. 94. During these rites, there are three phases of transformative process: separation, margin or limen (signifying �threshold� in Latin), and aggregation, or re-incorporation. The separation phase is behavior that detaches from the events of ordinary life. The margin phase or �liminal� period is a time of transition and transformation. The third phase of reaggregation or reincorporation involves a return to the ordinary events of life. Ibid., p. 95.
The first phase involves separation from the experience of everyday life and existence, as well as �the sum total of a person�s present state of consciousness, the experience of what phenomenological philosophers call the �life-world,� the way the world makes coherent sense to you at your particular place in life�You sort of know who you are and where you are, and where you have been, and where you are going.� Moore, Robert L., The Archetype of Initiation: Sacred Space, Ritual Process, and Personal Transformation, (Robert L. Moore, 2001), p. 78.
Comparing this first phase to the experience of ISL, I would say that the separation phase occurs when program participants leave their homelands and journey to Chicago to participate in ISL. What is being left behind is an understanding of self-identity, role, relationships with others, and participation in various communities, work places, or family. Familiar structure is left behind in this first phase. Ritually speaking, a threshold is crossed, and entry into sacred space occurs. On the very first day, this is ritualized at ISL by welcoming the new participants, introducing the staff, and inviting participants to a �walk about� The concept of the �walk about� comes from Australia. At ISL it entails the opportunity to walk anywhere and everywhere throughout the building, noticing, reflecting, and experiencing the sacred space. throughout the building.
Participants are invited further into this phase through opportunities to reflect upon and share answers to questions such as: �What brings me to ISL at this time in my life? Who and what am I leaving behind? What are my hopes and expectations as well as anxieties and fears for this year?� Institute for Spiritual Leadership, �Questions for Small Group Sharing� , Day 2. A map experience Using a world map, ISL Participants are invited to place a push pin in the location of the place(s) they call home(s)., an invitation to share a symbol from home Participants are invited to bring something which signifies home and share it with the group., and conversations about cultural identities are also symbolic exercises of separation. Lastly, individual story telling throughout the first month is a significant part of this phase. Throughout the month of September, participants and staff are each given twenty minutes to share their life story. At the end of September, the completion of this separation phase is ritualized through the sharing of bread and wine and a meal together.
While not as lengthy, when someone comes for spiritual direction, this, too, involves the first phase of separation. Individuals temporarily leave home/work/school/family to journey by car/bus/train/foot to a specific place of sacred space. When they come for direction, they come with a certain sense of self and a unique world-view. However, the expectation is that, in large or small ways, something will change. Essentially, this separation phase occurs each time a person comes for spiritual direction.
Before discussing the second phase in detail, I will briefly summarize the last phase. This phase involves aggregation or re-incorporation. This is a return to ordinary life or a return to structure. At ISL this phase begins to happen during the final month as quadrads. Quadrads are practicums for training in spiritual direction. They consist of three students who serve as the directee, director, and an observer as well as a staff member who serves as supervisor. finish, classes end, reflection opportunities abound, and good-byes are spoken. The closing ritual held on the last evening includes the presentation of certificates and a meal together. This third phase will be fully complete when participants return to home/country/work/community. Those who leave are different from when they came. Again, this phase can also be applied to a spiritual direction session; the directee returns to the ordinary world with new insights and awarenesses as a result of the direction experience.
Liminal Stage
The second or margin phase is the liminal stage, wherein the actual transformation takes place. It is out of the ordinary and an experience of anti-structure. People in this stage are �neither here or there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial�Liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.� Ibid., p. 95. The �dark night� described by John of the Cross is an experience of liminality. This phase is sacred space wherein �the ordinary consciousness is transcended as the individual�s everyday life-world is dismantled and deconstructed.� Moore, 2001, p. 21.
During this phase, considerable change occurs for those experiencing it. Turner explains:
Liminal entities, such as neophytes in initiation or puberty rites, may be represented as possessing nothing. They may be disguised as monsters, wear only a strip of clothing, or even go naked, to demonstrate that as liminal beings they have no status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role, position in a kinship system�in short, nothing that may distinguish them from their fellow neophytes or initiands. Their behavior is normally passive or humble; they must obey their instructors implicitly, and accept arbitrary punishment without complaint. It is as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life. Among themselves, neophytes tend to develop an intense comradeship and egalitarianism. Secular distinctions of rank and status disappear or are homogenized. Turner., 1969, p. 95.
The experience of ISL is similar in several ways. Often, clothes that were worn in ordinary life, i.e. clerical collars, religious habits, work clothes, and cultural dress, are replaced by more casual, western clothing. Titles such as Father/Pastor/Sister/Doctor are set aside in favor of first names. Roles of male and female, clergy/religious and lay, western and eastern, Catholic and Protestant, are diminished in favor of equality as companions on the journey together. At the same time the instructors, especially supervisors, have considerable teaching authority. For male participants, it may be their first time of receiving feedback from a female supervisor or observer. Female religious might find themselves �guiding� male priests. Roles are reversed. This is the experience of liminality.
So, too, with spiritual direction. It is possible that a priest will come to a religious sister for direction, or a Protestant to a Catholic, or a bishop to a priest, or a male to a female. Even the spiritual director needs to set aside the role of priest/pastor/religious in order to be fully present as director.
During the year at ISL, what also happens during this second phase is a deconstructing of the participants view of themselves, their lives, their communities, their theology, etc. Classes, dream work, focusing, active imagination, spiritual direction, body work, journaling, quadrads, etc. are all designed to allow opportunity to question and sometimes even deconstruct well known beliefs, assumptions, and ways of operating.
According to Robert Moore, professor of psychoanalysis, culture, and spirituality at Chicago Theological Seminary, �this is what Jungians mean when they say you are in touch with the Self. In Jungian terms, there is no time in your life when you are closer to the Self with a capital �S� than in this middle phase of initiation.� Moore, 2001, p. 80. During this second phase, �the unconscious manifests itself more deeply than before, but without as much repression.� Ibid., p. 45.
This opportunity for deconstructing also occurs for those in spiritual direction since the experience of direction is liminal time. The directee comes sharing feelings about very intimate experiences in life and the director guides in such a way as to help the directee attend to these feelings to see what wisdom might be revealed. Old ideas are challenged and new ways of being emerge. Those who have experienced good spiritual direction know they have been on sacred or holy ground.
Three Elements in Liminality
These, then, are the three phases of the transformative process: separation, liminality and aggregation. But, within the second or liminal phase, there also are three important elements involved. Robert Moore, building on Turner�s work as well as others, identifies these elements as submission, containment, and enactment. Each is involved in the experience of ISL in general and spiritual direction in particular.
We begin with the first element: submission. Robert Moore reminds us that:
Submission is a very powerful theme in world religions. The word �Islam� means submission. Of course today in modernity, submission has a bad name. If someone says you must submit, it makes you think they want to make a slave out of you. Without something like Turner�s theories it is hard for people to understand why anyone would compulsively seek submission, and then they decide they must never submit but always be autonomous. The person who must always be in control and autonomous will not be able to access healing and transformative process. If you cannot submit, you cannot die, and if you cannot die, you cannot get reborn. Moore, 2001, p. 47.
I believe this is, basically, the same process about which Jesus spoke when he said, �Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.�
When participants come to ISL to participate in the program, or when people choose to come for spiritual direction, the element of submission is involved. Participants submit to a certain structure and agree to certain forms. Those in the ISL program agreed to participate in the classes, the quadrads, spiritual direction, and the experience of supervision. Often this is not always comfortable; in fact, frequently it is quite challenging. For example, in some cultures, dreams are viewed as messages from evil spirits, so to engage in the ISL process of dream work is to submit to a risky and unfamiliar process. For others, noticing and giving attention to their bodies is an experience that is unfamiliar and, depending on religious upbringing, even may be scorned. Still others find it challenging to notice, feel, name, and explore their own feelings. Yet, in order for transformation to happen, submission must occur.
Creating Safe Space
Now, at ISL we consistently speak about submitting only if it feels safe to do so. This is crucial; it is important to trust that people intuitively know what doesn�t feel safe. Yet, at the same time, being in liminal space is risky and transformation is about letting go of the old and trying on the new. So, there needs to be continual discernment as to whether an experience is truly unsafe or merely uncomfortable. Submission is often uncomfortable but not necessarily unsafe. When in liminal space, it is important that we challenge ourselves to explore new possibilities.
Spiritual direction also involves submission. The directee makes a commitment of financial resources, time, energy, and trust. More risky, however, is a willingness to submit to a process wherein the directee will share things about which he/she may never have spoken to anyone else or admitted even to him/herself. Moore, 2001, pp. 62-63. Sometimes the process will be uncomfortable, painful, challenging, even embarrassing. There may be tears. It is a process of letting down the �persona� and allowing the �shadow� to come to light. This is not easy. In fact, it requires considerable vulnerability and trust. We should never underestimate the courage it takes to engage in such a process.
The second phase of the liminal experience is that of containment. This element involves the need for a particular place, time, guidelines, and facilitator. In indigenous rituals, the rubrics for rituals are clearly defined and carried out. Ritual elements are carefully gathered and have important significance. The space wherein the ritual is carried out is set aside, properly prepared and considered sacred. Those involved in the ritual expect transformation to occur and willingly participate in order to help it to happen. The leader is a ritual elder who is experienced, wise, respected and able to facilitate the process.
Because liminal space is dangerous and risky, it needs good containment lest chaos be totally loosed. These are elements of ritual that were observed and written about by Turner in his book, Ritual Process.
ISL Offers Containment
At ISL, measures of containment also are taken. The ISL building serves as a vessel of containment. The schedule of classes and breaks are carefully organized so as to allow for enough but not too much. Permission is given to participate �only if it feels safe�.
Confidentiality is expected and honored. It is understood that when doors are closed, no one is to interrupt. The staff is trained and has experienced the program first hand as participants. They are, themselves, in spiritual direction and supervision, and know from the �inside� what the transformation process is all about. These are all ways of providing containment for those willing to submit to the process of ISL.
Spiritual direction also requires containment. Because it is risky business, it requires a safe place that is private and comfortable, a safe time that is designated and uninterrupted, and a safe person who is trustworthy and can serve as the ritual elder/leader to facilitate the process. According to Robert Moore,
The container gives you a place where you can feel �sufficiently held,� in Winnicott�s terms, so you can let yourself suffer whatever it is that is timely and appropriate for you to suffer, or what you have tried to postpone, but could not stand without the containment. Human beings can stand a lot, but what they often cannot stand without help is this kind of suffering that is required at critical points in life. They need an environment to hold them, like a mother holds a child. So the container in some ways is an archetypal mother. It is a womb.
The prototype, or archetype, for effective ritual leadership is a �good enough mother,� as Winnicott says, �with her infant.� By that Winnicott means a person who is attuned to the organism of the other person, and doesn�t intrude where intrusion is not desired, and yet is not absent when absence is not desired. We must note that children are often mistakenly protected from the necessary suffering and struggles that they must face at various stages. One must have what the Kohutians call �optimal frustration� for growth to occur. The �good enough� mother allows the optimal frustration, while the pampering mother does not, thus leaving the child uninitiated into some realities of life that the child needs to be initiated into in early childhood. The holding environment is an image for that containing environment. Moore, 2001, pp. 64-65.
A �good enough� spiritual director will provide the holding environment for the directee. This requires a willingness on the part of the director to allow the directee to confront the not-so-easy issues that need to be faced. If the director tries to rescue or fix the problem, he/she becomes a �pampering mother� instead of a good ritual elder. Just as it is difficult for a mother to watch her child learn to walk, knowing that falls will inevitably occur, so too it is difficult for a director to journey with a directee into painful places. Yet, both must be done or growth is stifled.
In my own experience of spiritual direction, I recall a time when I was dealing with the anger that so often feels overwhelming to me. I had an image of a wall behind which the anger was contained. You could see it through the windows and it was threatening to come through the door that was slightly ajar. With all my might, I was trying to keep the door from opening further. My director asked if I might want to consider allowing the door to open and inviting the anger to come in. The very thought of it seemed outrageous to me!!! Yet, because I trusted my director, I was willing to at least consider the possibility, crazy as it was! She asked me what I would need in order to feel safe enough to do it. My answer was, �I need you to be with me.� And so she was.
It was an experience of containment. I was able to enter into a very scary place because I trusted my ritual leader to provide the holding environment. Again and again, I have experienced this phenomenon myself and have observed it as a supervisor. Directees will have the courage to travel into their own suffering if they have a director who can provide a secure holding environment.
Now, if my director had been afraid of her own anger or mine, she would never have suggested allowing the anger in. Nor would she have been willing to accompany me as I explored it further. Rather, in some way, she would have steered the conversation to safer ground and my growth would have been thwarted, at least for that day.
Director�s Self-awareness
This is why at ISL we always speak about the importance of a director being aware of �what�s going on inside of him/herself� during a direction section. Moore makes the following comments with respect to psychotherapy, but the same insights can be applied to spiritual direction. He writes:
The capacity of the counselor for containment is essential to successful therapy. You have to feel as if the analyst can control the situation in some way, at least as much as you need it controlled for that particular setting. The more disturbing the materials you have to deal with, the more secure you need the counselor to be for you to show them. Sometimes it takes a long time to get around to telling your therapist what you need to say, because you�re not sure whether the therapist can handle it.
In fact, the more we study these dynamics, the more we realize that the slowness of people getting deeply into their issues is a direct function of how much we are communicating unconsciously to them that we as analysts cannot handle it. Moore, 2001, p. 110.
This last sentence is so crucial it bears repeating and emphasis: �The slowness of people getting deeply into their issues is a direct function of how much we are communicating unconsciously that we cannot handle it.� So, as spiritual directors, if we notice that our directee(s) is not sharing anything very deep, before we decide that they are incapable of doing inner work, we must first look at ourselves to see if we are unconsciously blocking their process. This is one reason that spiritual directors need, themselves, to be in spiritual direction and supervision. It is one way of insuring that our issues are not getting in the way of our directee�s. It is one way of ensuring containment.
This is also why we speak so often at ISL about spiritual directors needing to learn to direct from the �inside out�. If we ourselves have not experienced that �dark night� of liminal space and lived to come out the other side and tell about it then surely we would never want to lead anyone else there. If we have not been willing to confront our own shadows then we will not invite others to confront theirs. If we have not sat in our own subpersonality chairs and know from the inside how difficult, even embarrassing, that is, then we shouldn�t be leading others into such an exercise. Our own experience is a necessary factor for containment. It is only when we know the experience from the inside that we are able to guide others into the process.
Opportunities for Enactment
The last element involved in liminal space is that of enactment. This involves an opportunity to rehearse the new behaviors discovered before actually returning to ordinary life. �Enactment means trying on new images, self/other images, and world images without having to take all the consequences for them, as you would in structured everyday life.� Ibid., p. 67. In rituals observed by Turner and others, before participants returned to ordinary life they practiced the new roles or new health that would be theirs after the ritual was complete.
During the ISL experience, participants are invited to try on all kinds of new images of themselves and the world. Separated from the authorities of ordinary life, it is acceptable to expand theologically, even to try on various heresies. Separated from the role of sister, priest, pastor, worker, it is easier to get in touch with the whole person who dwells underneath. Those who are used to suppressing their feelings are invited to experience anger, grief, sadness, fear, and other emotions that may seem very unfamiliar. Time with staff, colleagues, and housemates provide opportunities for practicing new skills, insights, and ways of being. This time of enactment is an opportunity for trying on �other possible personas and self-images: images of parents, images of women and men, images of sex, and images of world, and so forth. You do not have to commit to any of them, for no external authority is pressing upon you. It has to feel right to you.� Ibid., p. 67.
During spiritual direction, directees are also invited into enactment through a variety of methods. In using the technique of focusing, A technique pioneered by Eugene T. Gendlin of the University of Chicago that invites a person to listen to the body�s wisdom. His book, Focusing, describes the method in detail. when directees notice how something �feels in their body� and attend to it, often a new way of being emerges and a �felt-shift� occurs. In active imagination A technique that encourages a person to allow his/her imagination to soar. When the director helps the directee �ground the image,� often it is discovered that the unconscious had a message relevant to everyday life. there are no limits to what a person can do or who he/she may chose to be. He/she can fly, climb mountains, sit on a cloud, run through a forest, or walk through walls just to name a few possibilities. All kinds of new ways of being can be tried out in the imagination and then examined for the wisdom that might be revealed.
In psychosynthesis, directees are invited into a Gestalt method of placing a specific energy(ies) in a chair and then engaging it in dialog. The individual might choose to sit in the chair and notice how it feels to be that energy of anger or sadness or confidence, etc. If more than one energy is engaged, often it is revealing to discover how the two energies are at odds with one another, causing considerable stress. When these energies can be acknowledged and listened to, the result is frequently better integration for the directee. The skillful director needs to listen carefully for the energies, provide safe containment, and be a compassionate, caring presence throughout the process. It seems pretty crazy to be moving into different chairs and it feels even crazier; yet, in the end, the experience can be immensely helpful. Furthermore, there�s considerable benefit to trying out the craziness in the privacy of a spiritual direction room with a trusted director rather than on an unsuspecting family member, religious authority, or the world at large. The enactment stage is an occasion for practice.
Conclusion
In summary, ritual process involves the three phases of separation, liminality, and aggregation, or re-incorporation. In addition, within the phase of liminality there are the three elements of submission, containment, and enactment. The above reflections demonstrate how the experience of participation in the ISL program and the experience of spiritual direction are both good examples of ritual process.
In the end, the purpose of the ritual process is to facilitate transformation, a new way of being in the world to which a person returns. When participants leave ISL and return home, they leave changed, some more dramatically than others. New ways of being have been experienced and practiced and may now be retained or discarded. So, too, with spiritual direction.
If the director is skilled and the directee willing, the experience of direction will be a process that results in death giving way to new life. It will be transformative. If the director is not skilled and the directee not willing, the experience will be an interesting, maybe even helpful conversation, but not particularly transformative. Transformation is the end result of powerful ritual.
Selected Bibliography
Albright, Carol Rausch. �Neuroscience in Pursuit of the Holy: Mysticism, the Brain, and Ultimate Reality. Zygon, vol. 36, no 3 (September 2001): 485-492.
Ashbrook, James B. 1986. Minding the Soul: Pastoral Counseling as Remembering. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
Ashbrook, James B. and Carol Rausch Albright. 1997. The Humanizing Brain: Where Religion and Neuroscience Meet. Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press.
The Bible: The New Revised Standard Version. 1989. Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.
d�Aquili, Eugene and Andrew B. Newberg. 1999. The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
Joseph, R. �The Limbic System and the Soul: Evolution and the Neuroanatomy of Religious Experience. Zygon, vol. 36, no. 1 (March 2001): 105-136.
MacLean, Paul D. 1982. �On the Evolution of Three Mentalities�. Brain, Culture, & the Human Spirit: Essays from an Emergent Evolutionary Perspective. James B. Ashbrook, ed. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, Inc.
Moore, Robert L. 2001. The Archtype of Initiation: Sacred Space, Ritual Process, and Personal Transformation. Chicago: Robert L. Moore.
Newberg, Andrew and Eugene D�Aquili. 2001. Why God Won�t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. New York: Ballantine Books.
________. �The Neuropsychology of Religious and Spiritual Experience.� Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7, No. 11-12 (2000): 252-66.
Teske, John A. �Neuroscience and Spirit�. Zygon, vol. 36, no. 1 (March 2001): 93-104.
Trevarthen, Colwyn. 1986. �Brain Science and the Human Spirit�. Brain, Culture & the Human Spirit: Essays from an Emergent Evolutionary Perspective. James B. Ashbrook, ed. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, Inc.
Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
________. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
________. 1987. �Body, Brain, and Culture.� The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications.
Peters, Karl E. �Neurotheology and Evolutionary Theology: Reflections on the Mystical Mind. Zygon, vol. 36, no 3 (September 2001): 493-500.
Speczio, Michael L. �Engaging d�Aquili and Newberg�s The Mystical Mind�. Zygon, vol. 36. no. 3 (September 2001): 477-484.
Institute for Spiritual Leadership, �Toward a Theology of Personal Transformation for Mission�, Chicago, 2001.
Turner, Victor, Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1969), pp. v � vi.
Ibid., p. 7.
Ibid., p. 94.
Ibid., p. 95.
Moore, Robert L., The Archetype of Initiation: Sacred Space, Ritual Process, and Personal Transformation, (Robert L. Moore, 2001), p. 78.
The concept of the �walk about� comes from Australia. At ISL it entails the opportunity to walk anywhere and everywhere throughout the building, noticing, reflecting, and experiencing the sacred space.
Institute for Spiritual Leadership, �Questions for Small Group Sharing� , Day 2.
Using a world map, ISL Participants are invited to place a push pin in the location of the place(s) they call home(s).
Participants are invited to bring something which signifies home and share it with the group.
Throughout the month of September, participants and staff are each given twenty minutes to share their life story.
Quadrads are practicums for training in spiritual direction. They consist of three students who serve as the directee, director, and an observer as well as a staff member who serves as supervisor.
Ibid., p. 95.
Moore, 2001, p. 21.
Turner., 1969, p. 95.
Moore, 2001, p. 80.
Ibid., p. 45.
Moore, 2001, p. 47.
Moore, 2001, pp. 62-63.
These are elements of ritual that were observed and written about by Turner in his book, Ritual Process.
Moore, 2001, pp. 64-65.
Moore, 2001, p. 110.
Ibid., p. 67.
Ibid., p. 67.
A technique pioneered by Eugene T. Gendlin of the University of Chicago that invites a person to listen to the body�s wisdom. His book, Focusing, describes the method in detail.
A technique that encourages a person to allow his/her imagination to soar. When the director helps the directee �ground the image,� often it is discovered that the unconscious had a message relevant to everyday life. | |
